Mandriva has done quite a lot of work on optimizing boot speed for its latest release, Mandriva Linux 2009. Frederic Crozat (head of the French engineering team) has written a blog post summarizing Mandriva's past work on this front, and the tweaks and improvements made for 2009. It shows that close analysis of inefficiencies in boot, and fixing 'small' bugs, can result in gains as large or larger than 'big picture' items like new initialization systems.

This is why I use a desktop distro where things are optimized for the desktop. Server distros like red Hat, Suse or even debian don't care about boot time, as they usually stay up for months. Mandriva is really the best distro for the desktop in my opinion. It has desktop stuff like fast boot time, DKMS and the draktools that makes it the most desktop suited distro.

Red Hat is amoung the largest desktop contributors including the #1 contributor to Xorg and many of the freedesktop.org components.

Even if you read this article, bootchart, preload, readahead and other major components come from work done within Fedora. Arjan's original work to demonstrate boot speedup was done within Fedora and there is some development changes made already in view of that.

Indeed, Fedora do a lot of valuable work in the area. Everything is ultimately a collaboration, that's how open source works (ideally).

Of course, Xandros had a super-fast-boot system tailored to the Eee hardware before Arjan's work - it's what comes with the Eee. Claudio Matsuoka has been working on reimplementing, improving and extending Xandros's system since early this year, as the finit project: http://helllabs.org/finit/ .

This is why I use a desktop distro where things are optimized for the desktop. Server distros like red Hat, Suse or even debian don't care about boot time, as they usually stay up for months.

I think you just mischaracterized Debian. That's a common enough mistake. You see, Debian is a non-profit community-based distro, and they can't afford to spend a lot of money to marketing themselves and creating a user-friendly image. So there are a lot of people out there who haven't recently (or at all) installed or used Debian, and yet they claim to know that Debian is "too difficult", "outdated", "only for servers", etc. But that's just their own prejudice, it's not what Debian really is.

Debian GNU/Linux aims to be a "Universal Operating System" -- good for both servers and desktops, suitable for both experienced users and beginners alike. Therefore, Debian *does* care about the things that affect how desktop users experience the system, such as boot time.

In fact, Debian participated in the 2006 Google Summer of Code with a project to speed up the boot process and make it dependency based. As a result, Debian boots considerably faster in 2008 than it did in 2006. Also, the upcoming Debian 5.0 release (code name "Lenny") introduces dependency based boot sequence, which should make the boot process more reliable.